Simulation of heat transfer and cure in pultrusion with a general-purpose finite element package

This paper describes the development and validation of a numerical procedure for the simulation of temperature and cure profiles for the pultrusion process. The governing equations for heat transfer and the resin cure reaction during pultrusion are presented. A new finite-element/finite-difference/control-volume procedure is developed to solve the governing equations. The accuracy and other numerical behavior of the procedure are investigated by a number of numerical simulations. It is shown that the procedure is numerically stable and predicts the temperature and cure profiles which are in good agreement with those published by other researchers.